Caracterización del sector

Ashgate: Aldershot, 2007, xxii + 306 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-7546-5445-2 (hbk), £60.00

Reviewed by Martin Iddon, Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts

With Berio’s death in 2003 still recent, it is certainly an appropriate time for scholars to begin a large-scale reappraisal of the import and impact of his musical output. That the ongoing development of his virtuosic

Sequenzas for solo instruments was central to Berio’s compositional work

and thinking is hardly in doubt. It seems apt, then, that the first major English-language scholarly publication to deal with his music since his death, engages with precisely these pieces.

As the book’s subtitle suggests, the chapters are divided by three broad themes: performance issues; compositional processes and aesthet- ics; and analytical approaches. With the exception of Sequenza XII for bassoon and Sequenza XIV for cello, each of the Sequenzas is examined in detail at some point during the volume; Sequenza I for flute, Sequenza III for voice and Sequenza IV for piano feature prominently in more than one of the contributions.

In the first section of the volume, two essays (one by Cynthia Folio and Alexander R. Brinkman, which examines Sequenza I, and one by Patricia Alessandrini, which focuses on Sequenza VII for oboe) take as their theme issues posed by the fact that each of these two Sequenzas exists in two dis- crete versions. The first essay examines performative distinctions between the 1958 version’s proportional and the 1992 version’s precisely metrical notation. While both these versions were completed by Berio himself, Alessandrini considers immanent differences between Berio’s original notational grid structure for Sequenza VII and a redrafted, metered version by the oboist Jacqueline Leclair. Although, in a similar way, multiple ver- sions of Sequenza IV exist, Zoe Browder Doll’s essay focuses on just one, concentrating specifically on Berio’s various uses of the sostenuto pedal in this version of the piece (and in Leaf and Sonata), demonstrating the rich range of tonal vocabulary Berio draws from technical means. Though more analytically superficial than the other essays in this section, Kirsty Whatley’s personal reflections upon Sequenza II, written from the harpist’s perspective, contain many striking observations that analysis alone might be unable to educe. Jonathan Impett’s response to Sequenza X also contains ideas developed from his own experience as a performer, situ- ating the piece within a wide cultural discourse of the trumpet’s gestural language.

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The volume’s central section is doubtless the strongest. Janet Halfyard’s contribution – informed by, but certainly not limited to, her own performa- tive engagement with the theatre of Sequenza III – dovetails neatly with Impett’s. She marshals numerous contextual factors in an examination of the nature of virtuosity as it is (re)conceived within the Sequenzas. Like Halfyard, Paul Roberts’ essay, focusing on Berio’s reworkings of several of the Sequenzas into ensemble pieces, the Chemins, is informed by a factor exterior to the music, namely Roberts’ activity as Berio’s musical assistant. This inside knowledge is demonstrated by a rich description of the interlac- ing paths that the Chemins take away from, and occasionally back to, the

Sequenzas. Two chapters draw parallels between the work of Berio and

Umberto Eco. Eugene Montague interlaces his analysis of Sequenza VIII for violin with Eco’s Theory of Semiotics and, most especially, Foucault’s Pendulum. Montague’s essay employs an innovative strategy, whereby the semiotic mutability of Sequenza VIII is ultimately utilized to open more complex per- spectives on the narrative of Foucault’s Pendulum. The second Eco-focused chapter is similarly impressive: Edward Venn’s contribution reworks Eco’s theory of open form, finding imaginative strategies for building upon what seems to have been initially a misunderstanding of the way in which

Sequenza I might constitute an open-form work, alongside such unlikely

bedfellows as Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI. The last essay within the sec- ond section, Andrea Cremaschi’s examination of Sequenza IX for clarinet, and its proliferation into Sequenzas IXa, Sequenza IXb, La vera storia and Récit

(Chemins VII), as well as the withdrawn ‘Chemins V’, reflects the concep-

tion of the pieces under examination by walking the reader through the various paths the common musical material takes through these pieces.

The essays within the final section are predominantly examples of much more conventional analytical fare. Irna Priore’s discussion of vesti- gial serial practices within Sequenza I adroitly covers significant analytical ground, while demonstrating the ways in which even these practices might be regarded as to some degree ‘open’, working from the same cre- ative misunderstanding as Venn. Didier Guigue and Marcílio Fagner Onofre’s analysis of Sequenza IV is of a completely different order from Doll’s earlier consideration of the same piece. Though its observations regarding the larger-scale polyphony of ‘sonic objects’ are doubtless ana- lytically insightful, there is an extent to which this reader, at least, would have preferred to see more of the results of the analysis than the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the analysis itself. Nevertheless, the complexity (and subtlety) of the analytical framework will doubtless be genuinely valuable to some readers. Sequenza VI for viola is dealt with by Amanda Bayley with an equally rigorous analytical framework, in an examination of the various ways in which expressivity is generated through non-tonal means, focusing in particular on the piece’s transformations of timbre and tex- ture. Mark D. Porcaro’s examination of Sequenza XI for guitar utilizes a variety of analytical strategies to demonstrate structural and morphologi- cal elements of polyphony in ways that certainly suggest an extension of this tactic to a wider range of Berio’s output might be fruitful. This focus on polyphony – both literal and metaphorical – is continued in the final essay in the volume, Thomas Gartmann’s discussion of Sequenza XIII for accordion. While strong analytically, Gartmann never loses sight of the

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wider context, and many of the volume’s issues as a whole – performativity/ theatricality, openness of form, commentary, polyphonies of style – underpin an extremely lucid discussion of the piece, alongside providing the reader with a concrete understanding of how the nature of the accordion impinges upon the compositional practices at work.

For all that is good in this volume, it is a little disappointing that none of the contributors begin a serious engagement with the collaborative processes of composition undertaken by Berio in the Sequenzas, since, as is observed repeatedly within the text, with the exception of Sequenza IV each piece was written with a specific performer in mind, often in discus- sion with that performer, often in person. Despite the fact that the issues at stake in examining such examples of composer-performer collaborations rely upon primary materials, which may in many cases be extremely dif- ficult to obtain, the absence of such a discussion is palpable, even in the cases of essays such as those from Halfyard, Gartmann and Impett, where a detailed description of the respective instrumental idioms is on display. Nevertheless, as a whole, the volume contains much valuable, insightful commentary on one of the most significant contributions to the solo instrumental repertoire of the past fifty years, and will hopefully lead to much further discussion of the rich seam that the Sequenzas represent.